The Pink Panther

• 1. Introduction

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  The Pink Panther is a film franchise whose first installment ends with a cartoon animal being run over by a police car. In the closing seconds of the 1963 original, the car carrying Inspector Jacques Clouseau to prison hits a traffic warden. The warden is the animated Pink Panther from the opening credits. He gets back up as the car crashes out of view, holding a card that reads "THEND". Then he swipes the letters until they read "THE END".

  The film reached American theaters on the 18th of December 1963, and that final gag hints at how strange the franchise would become. A cartoon in a title sequence would grow into its own world. A policeman who was meant to be a side character would anchor a series that ran for decades. Why did a caper about a jewel thief turn into the story of the man chasing him? What does a series do when its star dies? And what is the Pink Panther, anyway?

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• 2. The Cortina Caper

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  Princess Dala of Lugash is given the largest diamond in the world by her father, the Maharajah. The stone has an unusual flaw. Look deeply into it, and a tiny discoloration appears that resembles a leaping panther. That is the Pink Panther of the title.

  Twenty years later, Dala lives in exile. Her father has died, and the military has taken over her country. The new government declares the diamond the property of the people and petitions the World Court to rule on ownership. Dala refuses to give it up.

  She takes a holiday at the ski resort of Cortina d'Ampezzo, where the English playboy Sir Charles Lytton is also staying. Lytton leads a secret life as a gentleman jewel thief called "the Phantom", and he has his eyes on the diamond. His brash American nephew George arrives unexpectedly. George is drowning in gambling debts, so he poses as a recent college graduate about to enter the Peace Corps. That keeps his uncle paying for his lavish lifestyle.

  On the Phantom's trail is the French police detective Inspector Jacques Clouseau. His wife Simone is having an affair with Sir Charles. She has grown rich acting as a fence for the Phantom, all under the nose of her amorous but oblivious husband. George, meanwhile, has decided to make the seductive older woman his latest conquest, so Simone must dodge both men.

  The night before their departure, George accidentally learns of his uncle's criminal activities. Sir Charles has grown enamored of Dala and is ambivalent about the heist. At a gala, uncle and nephew both attempt it, and both discover the jewel is already gone. Dala had faked the theft to keep her diamond. Lytton is arrested. Simone then persuades Dala, who has fallen in love with Lytton, to frame Clouseau by planting the Pink Panther on him.

  Clouseau is led away to prison and mobbed by a throng of enamored women. Watching from a distance, Simone expresses regret. Sir Charles reassures her that Clouseau will be cleared when the Phantom strikes again, and he is already planning the next heist in South America. On the road, two Carabinieri envy the prisoner his admirers. They ask with obvious admiration how he committed all those crimes. Clouseau considers his newfound fame and replies, "Well, you know... it wasn't easy."

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• 3. Casting Clouseau

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  Blake Edwards explained in his commentary for the first film that the role of Clouseau began as a vehicle for David Niven. Once the script was written, it was decided that Niven should play the raconteur and thief instead. The detective part was offered to Peter Ustinov, with Ava Gardner to play his wife. When Gardner dropped out, so did Ustinov. The role of Clouseau then went to Peter Sellers.

  Apparently, the tone of the film changed after Edwards picked up Sellers from the airport. During the ride to the hotel, the two bonded over a shared love of old film comedians, among them Harold Lloyd, Buster Keaton and Laurel and Hardy. The role was then modified to include elements of slapstick.

  In the finished 1963 film, the main focus was still David Niven as Sir Charles and his plan to steal the diamond. Clouseau was only a secondary character, the incompetent antagonist, who supplied slapstick to an otherwise subtle, lighthearted caper. That jarring clash of styles was typical of Edwards's films. Capucine, Robert Wagner and Claudia Cardinale were among the co-stars alongside Niven and Sellers.

  Sellers's performance proved so popular that the series was built on Clouseau rather than on the Phantom. The later films became more straightforward slapstick comedies. The next one arrived in 1964, and it had not originally been intended to feature Clouseau at all.

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• 4. Mancini's Sound

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  Henry Mancini composed the jazz-based Pink Panther Theme that became the series's signature. In the first film it plays over the animated credits. It also often accompanies any suspenseful sequence, and it did the same in most of the later films featuring Clouseau, in varied arrangements.

  The first film's score held other memorable pieces. "Meglio stasera" is an Italian-language set-piece whose purpose seems to be introducing the young actress Fran Jeffries. "Shades of Sennett" is a honky-tonk piano number that introduces the climactic chase through the streets of Rome. Portions of an instrumental version of the main theme turn up several times in the score. Most of the remaining tracks on the soundtrack album are orchestral jazz pieces in the style of the early 1960s.

  For A Shot in the Dark, Mancini wrote a different theme entirely. That music had a second life, because the animated spin-off series The Inspector later adopted it as its own.

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• 5. The Cartoon Panther

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  The animated opening of the 1963 film was such a success with United Artists executives that they decided to turn it into a series of theatrical cartoon shorts. The sequence begins with the camera zooming in on the diamond until its blurry flaw resolves into the cartoon Panther, though he is not actually leaping. DePatie-Freleng Enterprises produced it. The company was run by David H. DePatie and Isadore "Friz" Freleng, both former Warner Bros. Cartoons personnel, with Freleng directing. The character was designed by Hawley Pratt and Friz Freleng.

  The first short, The Pink Phink, came out in 1964 and won the 1964 Academy Award for Animated Short Film. It was the first time, and so far the only time, that a studio's first work won an Oscar.

  By the autumn of 1969, NBC was broadcasting the shorts on Saturday mornings as The Pink Panther Show. After 1969, new shorts were made for both television and theatrical release. Sister series soon followed, including The Inspector, featuring a comical French police officer based on Clouseau.

  The Pink Panther was traditionally mute. For a 1993-1995 animated television series, the actor Matt Frewer gave him a voice. Michael Sinterniklaas voiced him in two computer games based on that series, The Pink Panther: Passport to Peril in 1996 and The Pink Panther: Hokus Pokus Pink in 1997. Elements of the films were also adapted into books, comic books and other animated series.

  Owens Corning Fiberglass insulation was the most notable of several companies to use the character in advertising campaigns. Pink Panther and Pals, a short-lived series from 2010, was aimed at younger children. On Sesame Street, the panther demonstrated his karate skills by carving the letter K out of a block of stone, which then crumbled quickly.

  The cartoon character returned to the opening sequences of the live-action films in 1975.

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• 6. The Sellers Years

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  A Shot in the Dark, released in 1964, was the first film to make Clouseau its protagonist. He investigates a murder in a mansion in Paris. The film introduced many of the tropes and supporting characters long tied to the series. Herbert Lom played Commissioner Dreyfus, André Maranne played his assistant François, and Burt Kwouk played Clouseau's manservant Cato. Many critics, including Leonard Maltin, regard it as the best film in the series. It has neither the diamond nor the animated panther in its credits and ending, a distinction it shares only with Inspector Clouseau.

  Inspector Clouseau, from 1968, stars Alan Arkin and features none of the other recurring characters. The Mirisch Corporation, which owned the rights to the Pink Panther and Clouseau characters, produced it. Sellers, Edwards and Mancini had no part in it. Fans generally do not count it as canon, though some of Arkin's performance and costuming were kept when Sellers resumed the role.

  More than a decade after his previous portrayal, Sellers returned as Clouseau in The Return of the Pink Panther in 1975. The diamond came back too, along with most of the earlier creative team. Edwards directed, Mancini composed, and Lom, Kwouk and Maranne reprised their roles. David Niven declined to play Sir Charles Lytton again, so Christopher Plummer took the part. The film earned about $41.8 million in North America against a $5 million budget.

  That fourth film's title gave the series its naming habit. The phrase "Pink Panther" was used for every later film, even when the jewel did not figure in the plot. In the end the jewel appeared in only six of the eleven films. The name attached itself to Clouseau much as Frankenstein has been used in film titles to refer to Dr. Frankenstein's creation, or The Thin Man was used in a series of detective films.

  In The Pink Panther Strikes Again, from 1976, Dreyfus's insanity reached its zenith as he tried to blackmail the rest of the world into killing Clouseau. Omar Sharif made an uncredited cameo. Revenge of the Pink Panther, from 1978, pitted Clouseau against the French Connection. It was the last film in which Sellers played the role. It also earned about $49.6 million in North America, the most of any film in the original series.

  Peter Sellers died in 1980, and the next film arrived two years after that.

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• 7. Life After Sellers

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  Romance of the Pink Panther would have been the seventh film in the franchise, written by Peter Sellers and Jim Moloney. A rift between Edwards and Sellers meant Edwards would not have directed it. The plot had Clouseau smitten with a cat burglar called "the Frog", played by Pamela Stephenson. After Sellers died in July 1980, it was reported that Dudley Moore might take over as Clouseau. Edwards chose instead to introduce a new character rather than recast the role. Clive Donner and Sidney Poitier were each reported at various times as director, and Donner's name sat on the cover sheet of the July 1980 final draft.

  Trail of the Pink Panther, in 1982, was the first film made after Sellers's death. His Clouseau was assembled from scenes cut from Strikes Again, plus flashbacks from the earlier films. It was meant as a tribute. After its release, however, Sellers's widow Lynne Frederick successfully sued Edwards and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer for tarnishing her husband's memory. David Niven and Capucine returned to their roles from the first film. Critics and audiences rejected it.

  Curse of the Pink Panther, in 1983, handed the lead to a new character, the blundering American detective Sgt. Clifton Sleigh, played by Ted Wass. Sleigh pursues Clouseau and the diamond, both of which had disappeared in Trail. Clouseau resurfaces, after plastic surgery to disguise his identity, in a cameo by Roger Moore, who is credited as "Turk Thrust II". The film was meant to launch a new run of misadventures. Dismal box office, a critical drubbing and a complicated series of lawsuits between Edwards and MGM instead led to a decade-long hiatus.

  That lawsuit was settled out of court in 1988, around the time Edwards came up with one final film idea. In the late 1980s, MGM/UA also developed a live-action and animation hybrid television series, encouraged by the success of Who Framed Roger Rabbit. It would have followed a young reporter, played by Charlie Schlatter, who is helped in his investigations by the Pink Panther. For unknown reasons, it was never greenlit.

  Son of the Pink Panther, in 1993, was Edwards's last attempt to revive the series. He cast the Italian actor Roberto Benigni as Gendarme Jacques Gambrelli, Clouseau's illegitimate son by Maria Gambrelli, the murder suspect from A Shot in the Dark. Herbert Lom, Burt Kwouk, Graham Stark and Claudia Cardinale all returned. The film failed with critics and audiences alike, earning about $2.4 million in North America against a $28 million budget. It was the final film for Edwards and for Henry Mancini, who died in 1994.

  It would be more than a decade before a new Clouseau appeared on screen.

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• 8. Reboots and Revivals

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  The Pink Panther of February 2006 starred Steve Martin as Clouseau and Kevin Kline as Chief Inspector Dreyfus. Shawn Levy directed and Robert Simonds produced. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer released it, co-produced with Columbia Pictures. It was not a remake of the original film. Set in the present day, it formed a new starting point in a different continuity, introducing Clouseau, Dreyfus and the famous diamond to a new generation. Most critics panned it, yet it grossed $164.1 million against an $80 million budget.

  The Pink Panther 2, in 2009, brought Martin back, but John Cleese replaced Kevin Kline as Chief Inspector Dreyfus. Reviews were negative and the box office meager, with a worldwide total of $76 million against a $70 million budget. Across all eleven films, the franchise has grossed about $406.5 million worldwide.

  In March 2014, MGM announced a new feature that mixed live action and computer animation and starred the Pink Panther himself. David Silverman was set to direct, with Walter Mirisch and Julie Andrews producing. Andrews is the widow of Blake Edwards, and she was to be creatively involved. Unlike earlier installments, the project would focus on the title character rather than on Clouseau. By November 2020, Jeff Fowler had replaced Silverman as director. Chris Bremner was hired to write the script, with Lawrence Mirisch joining as an additional producer.

  By April 2023, Amazon had acquired MGM and announced that its Amazon Studios subsidiary, now called Amazon MGM Studios, was developing a movie and a television series. It was later reported that Eddie Murphy was in talks to play Clouseau. In July 2025, Murphy confirmed that he would take the role.

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